The Blue Tapes House Band vol. 3: Chase Me Before The Plague
Pro-dubbed C120 (track repeats both sides) with all-over onbody printing and printed O-card case
It’s like when our minds are volcanos, just blasting out neurons.
I’m not quite sure how to describe this release - the latest by Blue Tapes supergroup The Blue Tapes House Band - which I think is a good thing. I mean, I could say that it sounds like a column of white-hot star matter scrolling at lightspeed into the gaping maw of a black hole, which is TOTALLY what it sounds like to me, but that would probably be quite pretentious, and actually maybe that isn’t how it sounds at all, but rather how I interpret it when I listen, volume cranked to infinity, eyes clenched shut.
Light and heat and antimatter and void.
We can probably agree that whatever this 57 min blast of energy is comprised of, the way it is heading is UP. Utterly indefinable noise and not-quite shapes being sucked upwards forever, while two sentient forces swirl within, bound in some cosmic hate-ballet. These wormhole angels are played on this recording by Oxbow’s Eugene S. Robinson and Map 71’s Lisa Jayne, whose spoken word utterances throughout this infernoscape feel locked like horns - simultaneously at odds and of a piece.
This is the most intense recording this label has ever released. The only thing matching it in terms of sheer transdimensional horror is Jute Gyte’s epic avant-black metal reading of 20th century American poetry on The Sparrow.
It doesn’t appear to contain a note of music. Which is weird, because I know there are some in there - because I committed many of them to hard drive via my BC Rich guitar when I sent the seeds of this piece to Matt Collins. My only explanation for what could have happened to them is that Matt expanded each riff and scrape and lead out and out until he could see and poke in amongst the individual atoms, and then smashed those atoms hard into each other in some kind of globe-traversing particle accelerator.
And then probably the ‘music’ is just him making a field recording of that, I don’t know.
We’ve been keeping ourselves to ourselves to a while, conscious of not wanting to take up too much room. But fuck it, it’s 2019, Blue Tapes is back, and we got obnoxious as hell. Jack in to these sounds, incinerate your mind, transubstantiate.
Praise for vol. 3:
"For nearly an hour, pure white noise rolls out of the speakers like the sound of surf amplified to shocking levels, while Map 71‘s Lisa Jayne and Oxbow‘s Eugene S Robinson deliver drifting lines that sound as they are being uttered by apocalypse survivors. Their voices are the antithesis of the roiling soundscape; they sound shell-shocked, deadpan, stunned, while the whole time around them the sound is harsh and relentless. It drones over everything in its path like some sort of metallicised steamroller." - Freq
"Around 32 minutes in, harmonic sounds start to grow out of the metallic grey of the noise, interwoven with disturbing industrial noises, resembling nothing so much as a score to a ‘60s science fiction movie. The most constant notes begin to sound like alarms, varied not in themselves but by the backdrop against which they’re placed. Further along, around the 41-minute mark, the sounds turn symphonic, this time made to sound more melodic because of the contrast with all that has come before. The music reaches a fevered urgency around 46 minutes in; alarm bells sound again a few minutes later. In the final minutes, one senses creatures swooping in onto a fully realized dark landscape. And then it is over. And it is very, very quiet in your room. Too quiet. You hit rewind." - Echoes & Dust